Neal Asher: Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

Mars . . .

If she was honest, this was her prime reason for coming outside, rather than any real expectation of finding Saul out here. There it was, filling up a large portion of the view, the outer rim of Argus seemingly heading towards it like some steel bridge. She was sure she could even see the inky shadow of Argus Station down on the planet, though that might have been some feature integral to the surface. Hannah spent some minutes absorbing the view, also spotting Phobos poised just beyond the curve of its horizon, then almost reluctantly turned to peer at the nearest space plane.

No sign of activity here, but beyond it, higher up the pillar, she could see a hint of movement. She began walking towards it, and on circumventing the wing of the nearest plane, a second space plane came into view. It had been gutted.

Robots were picking amid the remains of the vehicle like ants in the dismembered corpse of a crow. Its wings had been detached, and the cockpit had been taken apart. Most of the passenger and cargo area lay over to one side, and the pillar itself was strewn with fragments of flame-cut metal, pipes, nuts and bolts and other fixings, and wisps of insulating material like some vacuum-resistant moss. Perhaps this plane had been hit by some kind of weapon during the recent attack?

‘Alan is nowhere to be seen either in or on Docking Pillar Two,’ Hannah told Le Roque reproachfully, when he finally responded to her call.

‘You got that right,’ Le Roque replied, sounding irritated.

‘What do you mean?’

‘It looks like he’s gone off to perform a particularly spectacular form of suicide.’

‘What?’

Le Roque dryly explained to her how they were about to lose their Owner . . .

Mars

Var’s head-up display read zero, but there were always a few more minutes of air remaining after that. She lay against a rock, trying to control her breathing. She didn’t want to get into a panic, start panting away her last moments of air and end up trying to tear off her EA suit helmet. She wondered how nitrogen suffocation would feel. Were the contentions that it was a painless way to die just complete bullshit, or would she indeed just drift away? Would it be like sleep with the moment of transition from consciousness to unconsciousness becoming a moment that could never be remembered? Probably. Then afterwards there would be a brief period of unconsciousness before her body started to die.

That hollow roaring in her ears, with a background of irritating tinnitus, was growing steadily. Obviously this was some side effect of oxygen starvation, just like the tightness inside her head, the feeling of growing pressure. She felt warm, too warm, would really have loved to have stripped out of her suit just once more before she died, to feel a cool breeze on her skin—

Cut that out.

Hallucinations now. A Martian wind was blowing dust along the chasma and her mind had connected that to the roaring inside her head. However, she knew the reality: that the winds here, no matter how fast they blew, were wimpish things in such thin air. And they certainly didn’t sound like the full-throated blast of a space-plane rocket motor.

Any minute now, she reckoned. Any minute now things would go dark.

Forever.

A shadow was how it started, as it seemingly passed over her. The start of that final darkness? It was a relief that was short-lived, as the shadow passed and a bright light glared through her visor.

Hah! Here come the angels!

A huge shape descended before her, but it had nothing to do with the supernatural. She was hallucinating again, her mind now creating little fictions to escape the inexorable reality of death. A quadrate framework packed with what looked like the main engine of a space plane – cylindrical fuel tanks and one dark figure seated in an acceleration chair – settled out of the sky on a ribbed flame, adjusting as it descended with scalpel blades of steering-thruster blasts. As it finally thumped down, the dust it had stirred up shrouded it from her sight completely.

Var felt she had to congratulate her imagination for that one, but felt rather critical of its engineering credentials and vector calculus. Okay, present her with comfortable fantasies, but at least try to make them believable ones. It quite simply wasn’t possible to take the engine from a space plane and turn it into what, centuries ago, had been called a flying bedstead. Such an object would be impossible to control, and that was before she even got into thinking about where it might have come from and how it could have been built in the limited time available.

Ridiculous.

A man clad in a black VC suit strode out of the dust and came to stand over her. He squatted, placing the oxygen bottle he was carrying to one side, then reached in and detached her spent bottle. He inserted the new bottle in place and her head-up display rose to a figure of forty hours. Immediately after that, pumps in her suit started working, blowing a breeze around her face, cool as the one she had imagined she would have felt had she pulled off her suit.

Var began to flirt with the idea of surviving.

‘Good, you’re alive,’ said a familiar voice over her suit radio.

She gazed up through his visor. It was her brother’s face; just the eyes were disconcerting. She considered further the impossibility of flying that bedstead contraption still hidden behind a wall of dust. Sure, it was impossible, unless you just happened to be the kind of person capable of stealing space stations and trashing whole planets.

She continued staring at him for long minutes, as reality returned along with its aches, pains and other glorious discomforts.

‘What kept you?’ she asked.

By Neal Asher

Cowl

The Technician

The Owner

The Departure

Zero Point

Agent Cormac

Shadow of the Scorpion

Gridlinked

The Line of Polity

Brass Man

Polity Agent

Line War

Spatterjay

The Skinner

The Voyage of the Sable Keech

Orbus

Novels of the Polity

Prador Moon

Hilldiggers

Short story collections

Runcible Tales

The Engineer

The Gabble

Novellas

The Parasite

Mindgames: Fool’s Mate

Acknowledgements

As always, many thanks to all those who have helped bring this book to your shelves, Kindle, iPad, fancy phone, computer screen or whatever. At Macmillan these include Julie Crisp, Bella Pagan, Chloe Healy, Louise Buckley, Amy Lines, Catherine Richards, Ali Blackburn, Eli Dryden, Neil Lang, James Long and others whose names I simply don’t know. Thanks also to Jon Sullivan for his consistently weird cover pictures capturing the spirit of the books and to Peter Lavery for his consistently meticulous editing. And always, thank you, Caroline.

I also have to mention all those fans whose comments, criticisms and accolades help maintain my enthusiasm for what I’m doing. Of course, on many levels, I couldn’t do it without you. Thanks also to all those unpaid keepers of websites and message boards, and the contributors both to them and the social networks, who have invigorated debate on all subjects under the sun, and who are steadily cutting the ground away from underneath moribund and tribal media organizations. With the excellent tool that is the Internet they have truly taken things back to ‘grass roots’ and we are certainly seeing their effect in the world today.

For this book I also have to thank all those who have written on zero-point energy, possible space drives and weird energy sources. It’s good to know that some are prepared to think outside the box, even if they are falling off the far side of weird.